I just want to know other people's perspective. If you are ripping a remastered CD (eg. Dead Can Dance' Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, originally released 1987, re-released and remastered 2008), what do you indicate on the YEAR field? Is it the year of the original release or the release date of your remastered CD? And is there any "manual of style" for it? (I use manuals of style for proper tagging)

I use the original release year, otherwise I would not have had any music from before the CD age on hard drive ... the Black Sabbath s/t is Friday 13th of February, 1970, period.Then I augment e.g. [2005 reissue] or [2005 remaster] or [2005 remix] in the album name (interchange word and number if you want it sorted by the amount of processing!).

I should likely have used another field. Will maybe happen some time in the future ...

I often want to sort by the year the recording dates to, never the year of a particular remastering, reissue, or compilation. And I'm not always using foobar2000 where I can customize columns and display custom fields. So, I'm essentially on the same page as Porcus, populating the standard year field with the original year. And I do that on a per-song basis. However, I don't like comments in the album name, so I just use the comment field for the clarification note about the year of remaster/re-release/whatever.

The ID3v2 spec differentiates between TYER (year) and TORY (original release year), but, unsurprisingly, is clear as mud, talking about "cover versions", implying TORY is really the year of original composition, not recording.

In most cases I leave notes like remaster, remix, re-release, etc. in the comment tag. For most albums I only have one version, so it works. If I have multiple versions in my collection, I might append it to the album tag as well.

For example:The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [Mono]The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [Stereo]

or

The Soft Bulletin [5.1 Remix]The Soft Bulletin [Original]

Even though they may come out in different years I usually don't find that important enough to include anywhere but the comments. It's really about just deciding where to draw the line between a re-mix and a re-master. I consider the first to be a new work artistically altered, the second just a re-transcribing with maybe some EQ.

Being new to the whole lossless ripping setup, I can say that in the past I have always used the remastered year as the year tag as well. Sometimes a remaster is truly just a digital remastering but oftentimes, with the music I have, it includes new / unreleased / bonus tracks.

Plus, most places I have looked online for missing tag info usually do the same thing - year of remaster instead of original year of issue.

If you're going to use it to find music from a specific era, then the remaster has to have the same date at the original.

If you're going to use it to sort an artists discography into physical release order, then the remaster has to have the "new" release date.

If you're not going to use it, then it doesn't matter. If you haven't decided, then pick something consistent now and store the "other" option in another tag. You can use mp3tag to change all your tags en masse if you ever change your mind.

I would say one should be concerned about what date external metadata providers would offer in what tag.

E.g. ID3 has TIME for recording time (clock! HHminmin), TDAT for recording date (DDMM); TYER for the year of the recording (YYYY) and TORY for year of the original release (YYYY) - according to spec, the first release year of the work, so if an album contains one old cover song it should have a different TORY than TYER. But no date for "this mastered version" nor "this release", right? So any attempt at putting that into the "dating" ID3 tags is nonstandard?

I can't let the badly conceived ID3v2 standard limit what I put into my FLAC tags. It sometimes means I put more info in there, to give a sensible thing to automatically cram into the ID3v2 when I transcode. YMMV, especially if you only rip to mp3.

I did not refer to ID3 to solicit it, rather I intended to that the ID3 specifications may have caused all these inconsistencies. OTOH, maybe a more sensible standard would just as well have been equally ignored by the software anarchy out there.

I only rip to FLAC myself, and Vorbis comments are luckily flexible, so I can have ORIGINAL_RELEASE_DATE and RELEASE_DATE as I please, and using uncommon field names protects me against external metadata overwriting with a year I do not know whether was intended to reflect original release or this release. So far so good, but it means I must do the extra work of populating/updating from other fields, and get these to work as I want to wrt display and sort and other uses.

I use the year the remastered version was released and i have a custom tag field REISSUE where i put "Remastered" or "Reissue" (if its rereleased, with bonus, different tracks or whatever but not remastered) or catalog number, if availlable (since i have no CATALOG tag or whatever).

i then automove the files to %ALBUM% $if(%REISSUE%). so that tag is mainly to seperate them somehow

I put in original release year only, no indication of remix or remaster on the album name, that info goes on the individual tracks, but only if they are actual remixes. Like for instance the 25th Anniversary Edition of Machine Head, where each track has both a remastered and a remixed version, I indicate the remixed versions in the track titles. But the album is still just "Machine Head by Deep Purple, released 1972" in my collection.

I am not an archival geek, I don't collect multiple editions of the same albums, I only keep one copy, the rip I've made from CD myself or sometimes an alternate version if I like that one better.

So yeah, I've let go of the obsessive collector mentality. I stopped obsessing and decided to just enjoy the music rather than any specific recordings or editions :-)